Trickster= Funny as Shit; Shit = Not Funny

Laughter at any one of the pieces we read this week is natural. Many people may be embarrassed to laugh at the pieces, though, because they have been taught not to laugh at them. People have been trying to remove the use of ‘potty language’ for centuries. According to Bakhtin, the vulgar and coarse language is, “precisely [what] the Abbé Marsy and Abbé Perraud tried to expurgate in the eighteenth century and George Sand in the nineteenth” (145). These people may be able to take the humor out of vulgarity by nurture, but that instinct to laugh at a juicy, wet fart is always going to be there. I believe that even the most prude person would have to laugh at “Trickster Eats the Laxative Bulb” when Trickster farts so hard and loud that he is on all fours and feels proud of the inhuman fart. The author of the Trickster story uses much more literary terms than I have, and this makes the story all the funnier. While laughing at a fart is harder to nurture out of a person, it is not so hard to remove the fondness and humor from curse words. A.R. Ammons’ “Shit List” has its funny parts, but I feel that the repetitive use of ‘one of the seven words you can’t say on TV’ is less humorous because, like most children, I really never got to appreciate the humor of ‘bad words’ because I was punished if I ever said one. Now that I am older, I use the words in emotional situations. This poem is not very funny to me because my upbringing taught me that saying bad words was wrong and my observations taught me that they should only be used occasionally. The story about Trickster and his abnormal passing of gas and defecation is easier to understand because the humor used, essentially what my parents taught me to call potty humor, is universal. True, according to Ammons, everyone shits, but that is nowhere near as humorous as Trickster’s uncontrollable farting because fecal matter is seen in such a low light that it truly seems to be nature that causes people to find it so repulsive. Farting is funny because it is a sound that is not often emitted in polite company. Shitting is not funny because there is an actual substance involved which the world has grown accustomed to seeing as vile.